Hi,
On Wed, Mar 12, 2003 at 11:45:48AM +0000, Miquel van Smoorenburg wrote:
> Hm, yes. However, some kernels have tmpfs support (it's called tmpfs
> now; shmfs has been deprecated, and you /do/ have to configure
> it in. 2.4 is broken with the shmfs/tmpfs distinction, btw), others
> have ramdisk compiled in or as a module, others don't have it at
> all, and it all depends on the kernel you are running at that moment.
> As soon as you upgrade the kernel things change and you do not
> want them to break ...
Hmmm, this is actually why /mem is nice: to abstract away all the
different ramfs-like filesystem types.
It removes the burden of catering for every kernel type / version from
the implementation of /run. Instead of having to find a correct fs type
for /run in scripts that set it up, /run could then be defined as a
symlink to /mem/run.
Perhaps /ram is indeed even better than /mem; we must then just make it
clear that it /may/ be emulated on disk or NFS on systems that do not
have in-memory filesystems.
I still think it's nice to offer applications (such as scripts that need
a /run) to offer a generic filesystem interface to virtual memory.
Scripts can't make syscalls to get at sysV memory segments, but they can
access files in /ram or /mem.
Cheers,
Emile.
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